1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to a floor covering, particularly a color-coated laminated floor covering with thermoplastic elastomers as its base material.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The base materials used in the conventional floor covering may be classified into several types: ceramic, natural wood and polyvinyl chloride (PVC). The PVC type floor covering has the distinctive features of being able to be manufactured quickly and is light weight, it is therefore lower in manufacturing cost and sales prices as well as installation costs are lower than ceramic and other natural wood coverings, for these reasons it is more acceptable by the majorities in our society. But the PVC floor covering is not fire retardant, and is easy to wear out after a period of time; PVC materials also emit chlorine which is poisonous during burning, it is dangerous and creates a certain degree of threat in case of fire accidental. In addition, it is not easy to comply with regulations for the environmental protection in disposition of PVC. Based on the above disadvantages, the general public and the environmental protection agency are lowering their acceptance to PVC floor covering. To overcome these drawbacks, their PVC floor covering manufacturers have recently developed a thermoplastic elastomers floor covering using vinyl and ethylene-vinyl acetate copolymers (EVA) as its base materials; but experiments show that the surface of EVA floor covering is easy to wear out and tear, at the same time, it is hard to use existing equipments to process and manufacture EVA floor covering, driving the manufacturing cost to be higher, this as well as its poor mechanical surface property lead to the fact that EVA floor covering is not an ideal one to choose.
Natural vulcanized rubber has an excellent mechanical surface property and is suitable for use as a base material for floor covering, but the vulcanization and thermal process for natural rubber is relatively slow, its manufacturing cost therefore can not be lowered and hence natural rubber floor covering is not competitive in the market. The natural rubber can not be reprocessed after the vulcanization. This not only creates an environmental problem but also increases its manufacturing cost due to the non-recovery loss in rejected products and materials.